A Blott about Blots

Today we begin a 27-part series on one of WLBOTT’s most requested topic: Sin.

We did a brief survey of all major religious traditions, and they are pretty much against it.

But before we begin the Nuts and Bolts of Sin, we decided to give our AI companions a Rorschach test. Using only the word “sin” as a prompt, and without any AI prompt enhancement, we generated AI images using a variety of models.

Here are the results:

Our favorite random depiction of sin may be this.

What exactly does AI think humans are doing for fun?

This experiment made us think of the Rorschach test. These are the ink blots that supposedly unlock the unconscious mind. The science behind them is iffy at best, but that won’t keep the WLBOTT research time from making wild assumptions.

First of all, there are actually 10 standard blots. I’d always had a mental image of a bearded Viennese psychotherapist spilling some ink onto a sheet of paper, folding it, unfolding it, showing it to the patient, and then asking in a snarky voice, “Why exactly does this remind you of your mother?”

The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects’ perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly. The test is named after its creator, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. The Rorschach can be thought of as a psychometric examination of pareidolia^[1], the active pattern of perceiving objects, shapes, or scenery as meaningful things to the observer’s experience, the most common being faces or other patterns of forms that are not present at the time of the observation. In the 1960s, the Rorschach was the most widely used projective test.
Wikipedia

^[1] WLBOTT is no stranger to pareidolia: